"Seven-inch tablets are going to be dead on arrival," chimed an ebullient Steve Jobs back in October 2010. "Seven-inch tablets are tweeners: too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with the iPad." We're not so uncouth as to suggest that Google will take any satisfaction from proving the late Apple CEO wrong, but the storm of hype, strong pre-orders and robust opening sales of the company's Nexus 7 (a seven-inch tablet, no less) appears to suggest that Steve wasn't entirely infallible when it comes to predicting the wants and needs of the general public.

It was always going to take something special to break the stranglehold that Apple and its iPad range currently has over the global tablet market. While previous Android efforts, including theAsus Transformer Prime and Motorola Xoom, have given it a decent stab, it has fallen to the AmazonKindle Fire, a super-cheap seven-inch challenger that remains exclusive to North America at the time of writing, to take the biggest bite out of Apple's dominant market share. Google has decided to follow a similar route, not only with screen size, but also with pricing. The Nexus 7 offers Tegra 3 graphics and an IPS screen for as little as $254, an astonishingly low price when you consider that the Motorola Xoom costs $500.